Kengan Ashura is a fighting manga with an anime adapatation written by Yabako Sandrovich and illustrated by Daromeon.
TL:DR of the issue was that the AI translations in English were son bad that he compared it to fan translations which ended up having the company hire the fan translators instead.
It started with Daromeon's X post:
https://twitter.com/daromeon/status/1787560049583477164
- daromeon
Google Translation:
The English translation of Kengan is a bit unique, so we decided to leave it to a group of amateurs who translated it without permission and uploaded it illegally. Their translation was far better than the official one. It would be pretty bad if they used the official version. No one would read it. I think there have been many works that didn't go over well overseas because of translation issues. I wonder how that would be with AI.
To further clarify the misunderstanding, here's a X post from a former member of the fan translation group in question which made an brief and concise thread summing up the issue.
https://twitter.com/FogMediocrity/status/1787893801681314128
- FogMediocrity
Why AI translations needed funding instead of hiring overseas translators in the first place? There has been a rise of dissatisfaction with woke localizers in delivering the official English translations. It's a rabbit hole on its own but the gist is that some of the dialogues and context from manga and anime adaptations get lost in translation due to localization which is understandable to some degree as you need to suit the language to local audience. But woke localizations, tend to insert unnecessary agendas in the dialogue which changes the context of the scene and this upsets the fans.
By spending more money in the development of AI translations, companies can reduce the costs of hiring multiple local translators and remove the threat of inserting political bias into the intellectual property but current technology still hasn't reach a satisfying point where the quality of the translations are good enough. It so happens that Daromeon is fluent in English which helped spot these errors before releasing an official translation to Western anime fans.
Even without the threat of woke localizes ruining the intellectual property, it's not unlikely that companies would explore the use of AI translations to reduce costs and raise efficiency. There are a lot of great manga published monthly in Japan and their rise to fame is limited the availability of translators.
While fan translations can be frowned upon due to piracy reasons, depending on where you stand on the issue, I think fan translations made it possible to expand the reach of these stories to a global audience before the official translations are out.
Thanks for your time.